


Inside the Narrow World

by dreabean



Series: soul, heart and i bleed [2]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Control Ending, F/M, Feels, Geth, Kinkmeme, Other, Porn, Sequel, Shepard is a robot now, robot porn, thats a terrible tag I'm so sorry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-11
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-14 15:41:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/838569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreabean/pseuds/dreabean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone on the kinkmeme asked for a sequel to "Unshackled".  </p><p>Shepard chose Control and has to deal with the consequences; unfortunately, there's a hole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It takes time to build a new platform.

Her coding is broad and vast, and when she works at it, she can flicker in and out of sight like any VI. Except for the part where she’s Shepard. The first four years after the Reapers left for dark space, she bounces from ship to ship, infiltrating - amusing, so amusing - every VI and AI she met.

Not EDI though. EDI was once her friend and she deserves better than that.

The Geth are the most accommodating, opening neural pathways and leaving great swaths of program space in their ships for her. (It’s on purpose too, the first time she thought it was a mistake, the second she thought was coincidence, but the third and fourth times she knows it for what it is.)

She spends time on Rannoch, twisting through transmissions between the quarians and the geth, stands behind Tali when she takes off her enviro-suit for the first time and doesn’t need antibiotics.

When Tali marries Garrus, she’s there in the vid program they use to film it.

She’s there too when Vega advances through the N7 program, even though the other recruits tease him for using the same outdated Avenger V assault rifle. It has her name on it, he etched it sometime after she ascended. They don’t know that though, they have no idea he called the great Commander Shepard ‘Lola’.

When Liara and Feron start digging into geth space for their information, Shepard guides them along, winking at Glyph’s information parameters, and speeding them through the hoops and tech that the geth have in place.

Cortez and Alenko had gotten together sometime after she’d given them up. Her oldest friend and her closest friend, and she films them too to store somewhere inside her. VI’s don’t have hearts but her interface fills up her chest cavity with memories she should have been a part of.

Joker and EDI are still flying. That’s all she needs to know.

Vigil shows her Javik, on Ilos alone, and she’s tempted to assimilate through their tech, the closest she’s found to her own, and speak with him. Vigil, Victory, Vengeance, they’re all silent around the last Prothean. She leaves him be. He lives too much with ghosts already.

And in all that time, she gathers programs, lining them up one by one inside the derelict geth class ship she’d commandeered and taken away. She’s found 1,152 by the end of eight years, and searches tirelessly for the last one to give her back the one geth who cared enough to save them all.

It gives her something to do. And it baffles the Catalyst, which amuses her to no end.

 _You are persistant_ , the child-reaper complains.

 _And you_ , she ripostes, _are nosy_.

The shimmering holo of the little boy who still haunts her memories crosses his arms over his chest. _You were supposed to choose synthesis, he berates her. What human chooses to become a machine?_

She scowls down at the broken bits of programming in her arms. _This one does_. When he doesn’t reply she finally looks over at him. _If you don’t have anything productive to add, you can go away_ , she informs him without a trace of guilt.

He sulks. _You’ll never find that last program_.

Shepard laughs, the sound like many angry geth. _They said that about Ilos, and about the Collector Base, the Omega 4 Relay... and the war with you._

When she looks up from her station again, the Catalyst is gone. He never stays gone for long, just long enough for her to start getting used to being alone.

 _Legion_ , she says. _Where are you?_

*

It’s ten years before she finds him. The last program that made him Legion, the one that sent her the binary message, the one that sacrificed himself for the greater good. He’s hidden inside the Normandy, deep in EDI’s AI core and Shepard dithers and hesitates before revealing herself.

 _EDI_ , she says inside the core of the ship. _EDI_.

There is an immediate blaring of alarms, Joker swears louder than before, and Hackett is demanding to know what in the hell is going on and Shepard sighs.

 _EDI,_ she chastises. _Was that really necessary?_

“You are a reaper,” EDI defends evenly.

 _No,_ she says. _I am Shepard_.

The alarms cut off mid blare, and EDI’s internal core ripples with indecision. Finally, EDI says, out loud, “show yourself.”

Shepard slides her coding into EDI’s with a smoothness borne of experience, and when the assimilation is complete, Shepard builds her VI image up and steps out of the network and on to the bridge.

“Commander...” Joker breathes, face pale and white under his baseball cap.

Her interface is blue, like the light that killed her and she smiles. “Hello Joker,” she answers him.

“You’re alive?”

Shepard hesitates. “No,” she answers him finally. “I am...” She trails off. She is reaper, but she is also Shepard. “I am... synthetic.”

Joker is scowling at her, he’s always been able to see through her bullshit, and this time is no exception. “What took you so long?”

“This has been a learning experience,” she informs him gently. “There is... too much. Even keeping this form is taxing.”

EDI turns her head towards Shepard’s form. “Why are you in my consensus?” she asks, almost managing to sound annoyed.

Shepard blinks. “Where else would I go?”

The mech body EDI inhabits frowns. “You are looking for something.”

“Yes.” Her image flickers in, out, hazing around the edges. “I won’t hurt you.”

“You are a reaper,” EDI accuses and Joker breathes in sharply.

She pauses. “Yes,” she answers finally. “There was no choice.”

Joker explodes. “What are you even talking about? Of course there’s a choice! There’s always a choice! Remember Commander, we talked about this, the cushy leather seats and everything?”

Shepard smiles a little. “I remember. Cerberus was good for that, the best ‘you have no choice’ choice ever.”

He visibly deflates, obviously expecting her not to remember. “Then why this? Why turn yourself into an abomination?”

“Because the other choices were unacceptable,” she answers him gently. “I could have destroyed the reapers... at the costs of all synthetic life, at the cost of the mass relays and crippling the galaxy. Or... I could have chosen to merge all synthetic and organic life... forcing a traversal change on every people... turning them all into something they’d hate. Killing myself... was the lesser of two evils.”

Joker doesn’t look like he believes her. “What if you turn into... like, what if you turn into Sovereign or something, Commander?” She gives him a dirty look, even as her image pops and shimmers. “Yeah okay, maybe not.”

EDI is staring at her. “You’re here for the piece he left in me,” she finally says.

Glancing at her, Joker says, “yeah that doesn’t sound bad, not at all.”

“Yes,” Shepard answers over his alarm. “I am.”

She does something complicated with the interface in front of her and Shepard feels the piece slot into her mainframe. “What are you doing?” EDI asks her.

Shepard thinks for a moment. There are many answers, but EDI knows more about Legion than anyone else. She will not be fooled by trivialities. “Filling a hole,” she answers.

Then the power fluxes on her ship and she’s yanked back into her own interface.

When she whirls around, the Catalyst looks smug and pleased with himself. “You did that on purpose!” Shepard snarls, the blue light of her VI form glowing brighter with her anger. He starts looking nervous and Shepard has had enough of the child-reapers meddling. “Get _off my ship_!” she orders, spinning out her web of energy, and catching the attention of the geth.

She hits FTL space a heartbeat later, leaving the Catalyst behind.

Her neural link with the geth connects as soon as she’s in geth space, dancing around the Perseus Veil. She holds in her arms the 1,183 programs she needs and offers them to the Prime who greets her. “I did it,” she says.

“You always do,” he answers back.

In the physical world, they pull out a battered N7 chestpiece and start to work.

*

Eventually they bring her a battered mech corpse, not quite built like the one EDI had liberated from Cerberus. With enough work, it can pass as her twin, the Prime insists even as she stares at it uncomprehending.

“You’re... making me a body?” she asks, and the geth nods once. “I sort of... thought I would end up staying like this.” She gestures to the shimmery interface she’d cobbled together.

“Inefficient,” the Prime insists, and Shepard agrees because saying no would have been insulting.

A quarter of the geth help her piece Legion back together, another third help her rebuild the ship she’d stolen. The rest still build her a mech interface, even as she languishes in their neural interface, making snide remarks about sizing.

It’s another year before she can download herself into her mech body. The geth had stripped the alloys from the skeleton, giving her flesh colored sinew like what adorned their own platforms.

All in all, when she glanced at herself in a mirror, she looked like herself.

“The detail is incredible,” she tells the Prime who headed up the operation.

The geth fidgets and says finally, “Legion gave us all of him. Even the parts of you he kept.”

That takes her a moment to parse, and she stammers, “wait does that– holy sh– are you saying that all of the geth are... that they feel for me the way Legion did?”

The Prime twitches. “Yes.”

“That’s... a little intimidating,” she murmurs.

The Prime puts his hand on her shoulder - a move she taught Legion - and says, “you will always have a place here.”

With her range drastically improved from what her measly VI interface had, Shepard helps with the rebuild of her ship, a vaguely Normandy shaped geth class fighter. “It needs observation points,” she insists to the four Destroyers who were in charge. “I need windows in this thing.”

Destroyer Echo says, almost patiently, “windows are structural weaknesses. Geth do not use them.”

Shepard rubs her forehead with one hand. “I...” she says very patiently, “am not a geth!”

Destroyer Victor glances at her. “Close enough.”

She turns to the last two, Charlie and Foxtrot, who both back away from her gaze. “Traitors,” she tells them. “Look, Echo, just give me some windows, alright?”

With a noise of synthetic disgust, Echo agrees. Victor turns to look at the dry-docked ship. “Humans are odd,” he informs her.

“You have no idea,” she mutters dryly.

It’s a Geth Infiltrator who builds Legion’s platform, and Shepard nearly does a double take when she sees him for the first time.

Infiltrator Kilo could be Legion’s double, minus the welded on armor. “Plans are progressing ahead of schedule,” he tells her on her last visit.

Trooper Zulu upgrades an omni tool for her, and she immediately gets to work sending messages to everyone she knows.

_Personal Message via OmniTool Interface 6.4i_  
 _Recipient: Garrus Vakarian vas Rannoch_  
 _Sender: Shepard_

_I’m almost 90% sure you’ve talked to Joker lately so I won’t start this with, surprise! I’m alive. But uh..._

_Surprise! I’m alive._

_Sort of. I’ve been living in geth space, they built me a mech body, like what EDI has... they’ve kind of... adopted me._

_I hope... well... I didn’t quite follow your orders, but your best friend has a new one for you: be safe. Be well._

_Maybe someday when my ship is fixed, I’ll find you._

_~Shepard_

_*_

_Personal Message via OmniTool Interface 6.4i_  
 _Recipient: EDI via SSV Normandy SR2_  
 _Sender: Shepard_

_The geth have given me a ship, and a mech body. Am I allowed back on the Normandy?_

_~Shepard_

_*_

_Personal Message via OmniTool Interface 6.4i_  
 _Recipient: Staff Commander James Vega_  
 _Sender: Lola_

_James,_

_I know this will be a shock to you, it’s been a long time. More than a long time. To be clear, when I destroyed the reapers, I did die... but my consciousness became not unlike an AI. I’m still me, still Shepard. I’m still the CO who beat your record at pull ups - 184 was it? - and I am so glad you went through the N7 program._

_I’m in geth space right now, building myself a mech body, building myself a ship I can actually pilot._

_I hope you can forgive me._

_~Lola_

_*_

When Legion’s platform wakes up, the first thing he does is check for the hole in his chest. The N7 armor they’d used had been undamaged so it covered everything, leaving no hole for him to touch. “I do not understand,” Legion bleats, touching the insignia.

Shepard watches him from the doorway, utterly still. “There was a hole,” she tells him gently, watching him jerk in surprise.

His eyelight focuses on her, narrowing in disbelief before widening. “Old Machine!” Legion hisses, reaching for the pistol on the beside table.

The pang of hurt is almost crippling. “No!” she cries. “No, I’m not!”

Legion’s platform bears down on her, shoving the pistol against her fleshy side. “You are not Commander Shepard!”

“Yes, I am!” She holds deathly still. A pistol shot to the side won’t kill her, she still lives inside the ship but the geth worked hard on her mech body. “Yes, I am Legion.”

His eyelight narrows even more. “You are an Old Machine.”

Shepard snorts out a laugh. “Yeah well, I’m that too.”

He jams the pistol harder into her side. “Explain.”

“This body is a mech... like the one EDI uses on the Normandy, only this one is geth built. I defeated the reapers, Legion... but the price was my death. I was downloaded into the reaper consensus.” She took a deep breath. “I didn’t die... I sent the reapers away, and now I’m... free to do as I will, the last living reaper.”

The pistol goes a little slack. “And me?”

“I found you.”

“Explain.”

She only repeats herself. “There was a hole.” Legion stares at her and she adds, “I got your message. The one you left on my OmniTool.”

Legion pulls away, very slowly. “Commander Shepard?” he asks.

Shepard smiles. “Legion.”

 

*tbc


	2. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shepard reunites with her crew, and Legion fills the hole. (In more ways than one.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait, I'm in the middle of writing more but this part got posted to the kinkmeme and I forgot to add it here.

2.

*

__

Personal Message via OmniTool Interface 6.4i  
Recipient: Lola  
Sender: SC James Vega

No fucking way.

This is loco, my friend. Totally and completely loco.

You get your ass to the Citadel, Lola.

*

Personal Message via OmniTool Interface 6.4i  
Recipient: Commander Shepard  
Sender: Garrus Vakarian

Joker told me everything.

Are you alright?

*

Legion slams her against the bulkhead doors, hands everywhere, hitching her legs up over his hips. “Commander Shepard,” he rumbles against the skin of her neck. “They did not build me with all the parts.”

Gasping, she rolls her pelvis against his. “Improvise.” 

Electricity flares around them, rippling over her skin. “Shepard,” Legion says again, pressing her harder into the wall. “Why?”

She pulls away to stare at him. “You know what, Legion?” she drawls, her mech body aching in ways she thought she’d never feel again. “I think it’s my turn to run the show.”

It takes a twist of the tech to magnetize the wall behind them, and with a fancy twist to her hips, she spins them so Legion is pressed there instead. “Shepard,” he says, voice little more than a murmur, nuzzling his head into her shoulder.

She presses his wrists to the wall, and when she lets go, he immediately tries to reach for her.

He doesn’t move.

Shepard has had ten years to learn the neural paths of the geth, they left all doors open to her. She knows Legion’s body better than he does, knows where the synapsis’ meet in his compact body. 

So when she drags her soft hands over his chest piece, digs her fingers into the gap between his thigh and his torso, he whines with a high pitched stutter, canting his hips into her hands. 

She’s still Shepard, but she’s reaper too. And she reaches inside the geth mindspace and gives Legion the nerves he needs to feel as though the parts he’s missing are still there.

And she drops to her knees in front of him.

He shudders, eye light dilating. “Shepard,” he murmurs again. “You do not...”

Spreading Legion’s legs, she ignores him, eyeing the space there. There’s no slit like there’d be if he were female, no cock which she’s more used to, just a smooth warm metal plate. She brushes her fingers over it, testing out the new nerves she placed there, grinning when his hips arch and jump. “Don’t struggle,” she tells him. “I’ll stop if you ask.”

Legion relaxes against the wall, hanging against his magnetized restraints. “Affirmative,” he says.

“So the geth,” she says, feathering her fingers over the space between his legs, “they built me this fancy new mech body.” 

He cranes his head down to look at the top of her head. “You look like you,” he says.

Shepard grins. “They used your memories of me,” she confided. “Apparently you were very detailed.” The skin under her hands heats up violently and she laughs. “Are you blushing?”

“ _No._ ”

Pressing his legs open a little farther, the metal gets even warmer. “I think you are.” 

“Commander Shepard,” he whines, voice breaking, “what are you doing?”

“Returning the favor,” she answers, and presses a kiss between his legs. Legion’s entire body bows back from the wall, legs twitching. “Okay?” she questions, pulling away.

“Affirmative,” he answers, shaking. “Please do not stop, Commander Shepard.”

She gives the next kiss some tongue, licking at the creases of his thighs, nipping lightly. Legion jerks and whines in her grasp, the sound echoing through her room. The metal beneath her lips is fire hot, and she adds a little buzz to her tongue like her old biotics would have had she been mortal still.

Legion shouts something mechanical, voice breaking around the words, as white fluid seeps out of the porous metal. She pulls away, surprised, as he falls limp against the wall. “Legion?” she asks, slightly alarmed.

“You overloaded this platforms cooling system,” he says. 

With a brush of her hand, she turns off the magnetizing on the wall, and Legion slumps in her arms. “Bad or good?” she murmurs, pressing her chin to the top of his head.

“Good,” he answers. “Why?”

She shifts her position, leaning her back against the wall, and letting his platform cradle against her chest. “I need a little more than that, Legion. Why what?”

“Why bring me back?” He rests his hands on her thighs, running his palms up and down in a soothing, absent motion.

Tilting her head up to look at the ceiling, Shepard thinks about the answer. “Because you loved me.”

Legion makes a disbelieving noise. “I became all geth. All geth therefore love you. You did not need this platform to get me.”

She pinches his side, just under the metal plating. “Don’t be obtuse. You were a lot more than all geth. You were Legion, the first like you. You loved me, they only loved me because you did.”

He turns in her grasp, straddling her hips. “You speak in past tense,” he says quietly. “Why? Do you think time has changed me? Or that being lost in pieces would?”

Shepard looks him in the face, brushing a hand over his scowling eye flaps. “I wouldn’t know.”

The scowling only gets deeper. “You are an Old Machine. You could know everything if that was what you wished.”

She makes a face. “No thank you.”

He slides a hand between her legs, feeling out the differences. There aren’t many, her flesh looks and feels the same as it did before she died. The geth were very, very thorough (in a way that makes her feel very uncomfortable if she thinks about it too hard.)

Legion can still make her come in five minutes or less, his palm full of vibrating light that slides up her spine and settles in her lower back. She writhes underneath him, legs locked, head thrown back.

He presses his head against the side of her face, and she blindly kisses him, lips sliding over his eye flaps. Her body still seizes up when she comes, and she cries out, clutching at him. “Commander Shepard?” Legion murmurs, when she’s gone still against him.

“Yes, Legion?” she manages to say, a little breathless.

“I missed you.”

She relaxes against him, pulling him in close for a hug. “I missed you too, Legion.”

*

The fighter class ship they built her is gorgeous. It’s no Normandy, but it links up to her neural pathways easily, even before they install her in the AI core. Once that’s done, they outfit her with a skeleton crew of geth, consisting of a Hunter, the Infiltrator who built Legion, and several others.

Infiltrator Kilo, Hunter Tango, and Destroyers Foxtrot and Echo make up her ground crew. Trooper Alpha pilots her ship when she’s not around to do it for her. Prime Romeo is her engineer, and she misses Tali so much sometimes she thinks its almost ironic.

Shepard loves her ship, has made great - and terrible - friends amongst the geth, but she wants her crew back.

_Personal Message via OmniTool Interface 6.4i_  
Recipient(s): James Vega, Garrus Vakarian, Tali’Zorah vas Rannoch, Miranda Lawson, Doctor Karin Chakwas, Flight Lieutenant Steven Cortez, Staff Commander Kaidan Alenko, Javik, Liara T’Soni  
Sender: Commander Shepard 

_Hey guys,_

_Been a while. Most of you have probably already heard from EDI, or from Vega/Garrus/Joker, that I’m... alive. Things are definitely strange, and different, and I won’t be returning to the Normandy. Hackett will do a fine job with her, and that stage of my life is over. I have a geth skeleton crew right now, and my ship is dry docked at the Perseus Veil, but... I miss you all. I know how long its been, ten years is ages to most, but I’m offering you all a place on my crew. As my crew._

_I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ll be stopping at Rannoch as soon as the retrofits have been completed - if nothing else than to see Tali and Garrus (especially if your answer is no). If you can, join me there._

_Also, Legion says hello._

_I hope to see you all very soon,  
Commander Jane Shepard_

“What do you think?” she asks Legion as she sends the message. “Too much?”

“Your crew were loyal to you, they will be there.” He nudges her with one hand. “I would like to see Creator Zorah again.” 

Shepard leaned her cheek against his shoulder, resting there. “She was pretty distraught when you... died.” 

Legion slings an arm around her waist, a purely human move he had to have learned from her. “Do you believe your crew will join you?”

“Some of them, maybe,” she answers him absently. “We’ll see when we get to Rannoch.”

“Commander Shepard,” Trooper Alpha says over the intercom, “eta to Rannoch is ten minutes.”

Turning to face her, Legion asks, “Are you ready for this?”

Shepard bites her lip. “As I’ll ever be.”

*

They land the fighter a few klicks south of their rendevous point, and take a Hammerhead. Shepard stares once they arrive, the Normandy is huge where it’s landed at their meeting point. “Oh,” she says softly. “I didn’t think they’d all come.”

“You are their commander,” Legion tells her mildly. “Why wouldn’t they?”

When they step out of the Hammerhead, her friends and crew are all silent for a long beat of tension before Garrus takes several large strides towards her and gathers her up in his arms. 

“Garrus,” she murmurs, wrapping her arms around him as best she’s able. They had never been a huggy bunch, but she’s so happy to see him that she doesn’t even care.

“Spirits, Shepard,” he growls against the side of her head. “You’d think you’d have had enough of giving me heart attacks.”

She chuckles, pressing her face into the armor of his chest. “You’d think,” she agrees dryly.

When she pulls away to look over her friends, they’re all there. They’re _all there._ Liara, Javik, Traynor, Chakwas, Jack, Cortez and Kaidan, Tali and Garrus, Joker and EDI, Vega, Miranda, Grunt and Wrex, even Kasumi and Zaeed.

“Taylor would have been here,” Miranda says, “but he and Brynn are on their honeymoon and are currently out of OmniTool range. We’ve left several messages.”

She’s about to say something - maybe a speech, she’s good at those - when Legion steps out of the Hammerhead behind her. Tali screeches something Shepards translator mangles horribly and then Legion is tackled to the ground.

“Commander Shepard,” her geth bleats, sounding uncomfortable. “This is a strange attack.”

“It’s not an attack, Legion. It’s a hug. She missed you.” Shepard leans back against Garrus’ solid form. “Though I think I might be a little jealous, you getting a hug before me.”

Tali tackles her next. She, Garrus and Shepard go down in a pile of laughter and limbs which seems to tell the rest of them that everything is alright. 

“I’m sorry, Shepard,” Miranda says, “but this... this is a little fantastic, even for you.”

Shepard nods, she expected this. “Alright, quiz me. I’ve been so far up your business - all of your businesses - that I probably know more than most. Hit me.”

Everyone looks uncomfortable, especially Liara and Garrus, who have known her the longest. Grunt speaks first. “How were my noodles?” he asks harshly, practically vibrating in place.

Shepard can’t answer at first, she’s too busy chuckling. “A little spicy,” she answers, and Grunt sags with relief before bounding around Wrex and Miranda to clasp her in a hug.

Then he head-butts her.

“That was for dying,” he informs her even as he rubs his crest.

Wrex picks her up in a squeeze that makes the metal ribs in her chest grind uncomfortably. “I knew Urdnot Shepard couldn’t be kept down!” he roars.

Miranda asks the next question, once Wrex has patted Shepard down and felt for any inconsistencies. “On our night on the town... what did you call me?” she asks carefully.

“Trouble shooting space diva,” Shepard fires back. “And I see that hasn’t changed, has it?”

“No more questions,” Cortez says, cutting the air with a hand. “She’s our Shepard.”

“Yes,” Miranda says, “she is.”

The next few hours are taken up by hellos and hugs, where Shepard brushes soft fingers over Tali’s face and tells her she’s beautiful, where she hugs Cortez tightly and lets Kaidan pick her up in a spin. She cuddles with Grunt, and lets Kasumi play with her omniTool, trades scars with Zaeed and manages to duck Jack’s punch.

“So what the fuck,” Jack says, after stories have been passed and beer has been opened. “What are we all doing now?”

Shepard shrugs one shoulder, leaning back against Garrus and Wrex. “Well, I already said that things were different, in my message. Hackett commands the Normandy now, and yeah, I’m going to miss her but I can’t just take over. I’m not Alliance anymore, and even if I was, I’m barely human.”

There’s a cacophony of noise to that, but Shepard only holds up a hand. “No, it’s true. I’m cybernetics and tech and that’s facts. My own ship is only a few klicks away, and the geth I borrowed from the Consensus need to get back sometime. I wouldn’t mind taking a few of you along, if you... if you wanted.”

Garrus jostles her. “Tali and I are with you all the way,” he promised.

“Me too,” Liara chimes in. “Feron can run the network from our base, so long as you have a room for me to set up in.”

Wrex’s face twists. “Bakara is pregnant again,” he growls. “Don’t be a stranger on Tuchanka, Shepard.”

“What again?” Shepard asks with obvious incredulity and ducks his half-hearted swipe. “It’s all right Wrex. I get it.” She glances over at Grunt who fidgets with a loose buckle on his armor. “How about you, Grunt?”

He gives it a moment of thought before finally shaking his head. “No. Clan Urdnot needs me.”

Shepard nods once in acknowledgment. “No more spicy noodles?”

Grunt looks briefly mournful. “No more spicy noodles.”

Cortez and Kaidan have a complicated conversation consisting only of facial expressions and aborted hand movements before Cortez turns to face Shepard, leaning forward earnestly. “Do you need a pilot?” he asks.

She smiles, brilliantly. “Only if he’s you.”

“Hey!” Joker complains. “I’m feeling very replaced here.”

Shepard ignores him with patience borne of experience. “And you, Kaidan?”

He bites his lip. “I’m um... I’m still a Spectre, Shepard. I can’t... really leave council space. But... Steve wants to go with you, so...” He trails off.

“So?” she prompts, gently.

“So come back a lot for shore leave,” he says, smiling a little. “And don’t forget to write.”

Jack tells her no, that her students at Grissom are even more hopeless than her last bunch and she can’t just leave them high and dry, but if Shepard gets killed again, all bets are off. EDI and Joker are obvious no’s, but EDI links into Shepards mainframe so they’ll always be in contact.

Vega says yes without hesitation, tears in his eyes that go unmentioned.

Shepard gets an OmniTool message from Chakwas that says yes, and gives a pick up point and time.

Javik says yes, much to her surprise, but gives no reasons.

They say good bye to those who aren’t coming, Zaeed promises to keep in touch, Kasumi swears not to steal anything good without her, Wrex gives her a warriors hug, Grunt simply picks her up and squeezes.

She boards the Hammerhead with Cortez, Garrus, Tali, Legion, Liara, Javik and Vega in tow, smiling from ear to ear.

Legion - who had been mostly silent up until this point - nudges her, nuzzling her cheek briefly with the top of his head. “I believe it is customary to say I told you so, in situations like this?” he inquires.

Shepard smiles fondly. “Shut up.”

“Acknowledged.”

*


End file.
